Positive Pathways (360G-SCVO-a0g0N00001gBGWlQAO)

Given the success of our pilot project and the learning we have accumulated, we believe that securing additional funding to enable us to further develop Positive Pathways and to continue to develop and deliver it in 2019 is essential. For many participants, our project will continue present an entry point and accessible route back into receiving support and engaging with professionals to explore how they can gain training, further education and employment. We believe that young people who are aware of their opportunities, aspirational and informed are more likely to succeed in the future. While our project seeks to try and create opportunities for young people to move on and be positive about their future, it also serves the purpose of alleviating difficulty and helping participants to overcome challenges. Additional funding in 2019 will help us to: • Support more unemployed young people who need our help • Combat the negative effects of welfare reform on participants by providing advice and information • Reduce the impact of povery and disadvantage by raising aspirations and helping young people to progress in their lives • Improve participants social inclusion by creating opportunities for them to try new things and increasing their capacity for having influence in their lives and their communities • Reduce risks and the effects of trauma and abuse on young people's health • Develop and grow as an organisation MITIGATING THE EFFECTS OF WELFARE REFORM Welfare reform continues to have a devastating effect on our community. Many families of the participants in our projects are benefit dependent and changes in the welfare system, in our experience, almost always result in the poorest households becoming even poorer and struggling even more to adequately provide for children and young people. One problem that we have observed an increase in due to welfare reform in our community is the volume of young people who are becoming homeless or effected by their families tenancies being unsecure. Our particular client group, young people 16 plus who have left education, are made more vulnerable to homelessness because of the introduction of bedroom tax. Although the Scottish Government have been pro-active in dealing with the bedroom tax through the discretionary housing payments scheme, we find that some families still struggle to access it; often because they don't seek out support or have the skills to apply in the first place. As a result, unemployed young people living in family homes are sometimes considered as a burden by the adults financially responsible for them. In our view, the bedroom tax has introduced even more tension into households that are already full of stress and financial anxiety and has been largely responsible for many young people we know of becoming homeless. Being a young person and being homeless is a perilous state of affairs. Young people usually find it difficult to access emergency accommodation and to get the right advice and information. If they do get into a hostel or a bed and breakfast on account of their homelessness then they can find themselves becoming even more at risk, sometimes surrounded by adults who have issues themselves and can be dangerous and corruptive influences. Our project makes a difference and mitigates the effects of issues like homelessness caused by welfare reform through providing the young people who participate in our project with practical advice and support to access benefits, including giving them information they can pass on to their parents and carers, and also by helping them to navigate homeless processes including dealing with the local authority and understanding their rights. The young people we support in our project are often clueless when it comes to welfare and don't understand the different benefits available to them and their families. In the first year of our pilot project nearly a quarter of the young people who participated in our project reported having a disability, yet almost none understood that they could potentially get extra support to help them financially and in other ways. Helping young people with mental health conditions, for example, to access National Entitlement Cards so they can travel for free on public transport is something we supported a few participants with last year and expect to do via our project in 2019. The issue based sessions we will run on money management include information on welfare rights. Even though the majority of our participants are under 18 and are often unable to claim state benefits we believe it is important that they have an understanding of not just the welfare system, but also how it is being reformed and how that might negatively impact on them and their families in the near future. We anticipate that several of the young people we will work with will require state welfare support in the future. For many, the kinds of things that might cause them difficulties such as knowing what to do, who to speak to and what to ask about are problems we can help them with in advance by helping them to build up their knowledge and skills. COMBATING POVERTY AND INEQUALITY We know that the majority of the young people that we help are living in poverty. Our project has a positive impact by both improving their lives in the present, through teaching them new skills that increase their capacity, resilience and ability to cope with difficulty, and by helping them to be hopeful about the future. Gaining fairly paid, meaningful and secure employment is at the forefront of minds of most of the young people who engage with our themed group-work projects, but is also something that feels remote and unreachable to many of them - they need us to help them to get their lives back on track and moving forward. We believe that for most of the young people we will support, employment is the main way through which the can have a better life and escape poverty. A lot of the young people who we will support in our project will have left secondary education with low levels of educational attainment and having had quite negative experiences. Some will have struggled to focus on school because they live in chaotic households and have had to manage their education alongside dealing with complex personal or family issues. Many of the young people we work with have been excluded from school because they have presented challenging, difficult or violent behaviours. In our experience, there is always a reason or an adversity behind what has negatively impacted on their learning. We work with young people to understand that their past does not have to dictate their future so that they can progress in their lives. Not succeeding at school can be deeply distressing for young people. Often their confidence takes a damaging blow and they lower their aspirations and become reluctant to try new things out of fear of failure. Our project builds young people back up and helps them to realise themselves what they are actually capable of. Many who take part in our projects will have totally disengaged from other supports and lost routine and structure in their daily lives. Some will have become involved in crime because they have no other alternative to make money. They need projects like ours to provide them with positive alternatives and so that they can begin to see a better life beyond offending. PROMOTING SOCIAL INCLUSION Promoting social inclusion is a massive, perhaps universal, aspect of what our project is all about. From our perspective, every participant in our project is social excluded due to one common reason – their youth. Young people simply cannot access all that society has to offer. Their voices are listened to and respected less and their inexperience seen by some as a weakness. The sense of social exclusion is further amplified in the case of the young people we actively target, where additional factors including unemployment, discrimination, family and relationship breakdown and lack of skills or knowledge also negatively contribute to their abilities to participate fully in society. We mentioned in our report on our pilot how we were often amazed by how little the exposure the young people we worked with had to different places, in particular other cities and the outdoors. In doing so, we are perhaps a little bit guilty of being naïve about the actual underlying reasons for that, from looking at it as often a matter of choice and motivation and not fully appreciating that young people are actually limited in the choices they are able to make in their lives. Many of the activities we helped young people to participate in during our group-work programme, for example, were new to them because they couldn't afford to do them themselves, would struggle to travel to or that they just didn't even realise existed. Again, we believe that gaining employment presents a way that young people can improve their social inclusion. We regularly tell young people that employment is about so much more than getting money; it's a route towards new friendships, experiences and opportunities. HAVING A PREVENTATIVE IMPACT IN COMMUNITIES We believe that our project will continue to have a preventative impact on the young people who participate. We will continue to target the most vulnerable young people in our community and we know from our experience that these young people are often particularly prone to risks. Through our issue based group-work sessions and the one-to-one support we provide to participants we actively work to improve young people's abilities for making informed decisions when it comes to the risks in their lives such as smoking, drinking, drugs and crime. As we have observed in the first year of our pilot, the participants in our project often do not have access to clear and impartial information and advice on many of these subjects. As a result, their decision making capacities are limited. We believe, quite simply, that knowledge is power when it comes to reducing risks and we know that because we are able to develop meaningful relationships with participants where we can establish ourselves as being people they trust we are able to genuinely impact on their risk taking and provide much needed help and support to young people around risks. We have also been closely following and participating in the dialogue around Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). We've attended several professional events and forums around ACEs and we were recently featured in a high profile STV documentary as part of their Children's Appeal which aimed to increase the general public's awareness of ACEs. The ACEs movement is gaining momentum in Scotland and professionals across all sectors are finding that they provide an excellent explanatory framework for understanding the relationship between childhood trauma and abuse and health inequalities. We know that many of the young people we work with in our project have experienced ACEs and we believe that our project has a massive preventative role when it comes to mitigating the effects of ACEs on young people's futures. Professionals who promote the ACEs movement recognise that the key to reducing their negative impact is not only to increase resilience in young people, but also to offer them hope and to create opportunities for them to develop positive and supportive relationships with people who care. We feel that this is exactly what our project serves to do and, as advocates of ACEs theory, we believe that the impact of our work has the potential to reduce the likelihood of our participants being effected by disease and poor health outcomes as adults. LONG TERM IMPACT In focussing our project on helping disadvantaged young people, our ambition in our work is underpinned by a desire to have a long term impact in people's lives. The young people in our community deserve better and we owe them more. We know that they want and value our project because they have told us that regularly throughout – they recognise and appreciate the positive difference that we can make in their lives. We fear for the future of our young people and we believe that is why we need to focus such energy on improving their resilience. Our project is called Positive Pathways because that's the message we want to promote to participants, but in reality we recognise that those pathways are far from straightforward and are complex to navigate. They live in a city that has enormous wealth and prosperity and with the right attitude and a will to succeed the young people we help should have genuine opportunities available to them to improve their lives. Sadly such opportunities are not so easy to access, but often the first barrier to change is the reduced aspirations of the young people themselves. By trying to tackle that issue at the point that we work with people, which we believe is key stage, we hope that our role in helping them has lasting impact and can positively change participants trajectories. ORGANISATIONAL BENEFITS As well as focusing on our project development and delivery, securing longer term funding for our project will be a key focus of our organisation during 2019. We know that through the funding we have accessed for our pilot we have amassed a strong evidence base for our work going forward and we are sure that with the help of continued funding for another year, we will be in an even stronger position to utilise that knowledge and learning in our efforts to secure future funding. One thing we have tremendously valued as an organisation during our current pilot has been the opportunities we have had to participate in the learning events that have been held by the Community Capacity and Resilience fund. In attending them, we have been amazed by both the different variety and diversity of the projects that the fund supports and also the commonalities. As a relatively new small grassroots and community-based organisation it has been invaluable for us to have the chance to learn from other organisations, regardless of whether their project is similar to ours or not. We found that many other organisations the fund supports face similar challenges to our own and we've really benefited from having the opportunity to hear from others about their learning. We view our potential future involvement with the Community Capacity and Resilience Fund as representing more than just finance to enable us to develop and deliver our work and a particular project, for us it presents an invaluable opportunity to feel like we are part of a wider network. We know through our experience with other funders that this is rarely the case and we appreciate how valuable and innovative the approaches taken by the fund to bring groups together is. In continuing to fund organisations like ourselves, we believe that the Community Capacity and Resilience Fund remains true to its aims to reach out and provide support to grassroots organisations operating on the frontline. We feel that organisations like ourselves are often best placed to tackle the issues in our community because we are actually a part of it, we see first-hand on a daily basis the challenges that face people living around us and we want to involve them in trying to create solutions – we deliver projects with young people, not on them. Securing additional funding for our pilot in 2019 will give us much needed time and space so that we can continue to develop an important and much needed project and advance our ambitions to be a consistent and dependable source of support in our community.